Biltmore Estate America's Largest Private Home
We woke early at our cosy Airbnb accommodation in Leicester just outside Asheville. After a quick home cooked breakfast we packed our pre booked tickets water and comfortable shoes and set off by car. The drive to Biltmore Estate was only twenty minutes along winding country lanes past small farms craft barns and autumn coloured woodland glowing in morning light. Soon the famous three mile approach road designed by Frederick Law Olmsted began leading from wild forest into formal parkland. At the gate our tickets were scanned we parked near the house and saw the limestone façade rising above the gardens feeling excited to arrive.
Biltmore Estate in the Blue Ridge Mountains outside Asheville in North Carolina is not simply a house. It is the most complete symbol of America's Gilded Age, a period when vast industrial wealth was expressed through European grandeur and a belief in land stewardship.
The Vanderbilt Family
The story of Biltmore belongs to the Vanderbilt family. The name comes from the Dutch Van der Bilt meaning from De Bilt. The dynasty was founded by Cornelius Vanderbilt known as The Commodore. He began with a single boat on Staten Island and went on to build an empire in shipping and railroads. At his death in 1877 he was the richest American of his time with a fortune of more than one hundred million dollars.
His son William Henry Vanderbilt doubled that fortune. William had eight children. The youngest was George Washington Vanderbilt the Second who lived from 1862 to 1914. George was unlike his brothers. While his brothers built grand mansions on Fifth Avenue in New York and elaborate summer cottages in Newport in Rhode Island, George was quiet, intellectual and scholarly. He was a voracious reader, a serious art collector and was fluent in eight languages. He was less interested in business and more interested in books, art and science.
In 1898 three years after Biltmore was completed George married Edith Stuyvesant Dresser. Their only child Cornelia Stuyvesant Vanderbilt was born in the house itself in 1900. George died suddenly in 1914 after an appendectomy at the age of fifty one.
The Vanderbilt fortune declined because it was never protected by a family trust like the Rockefellers. Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt died in 1877 worth over one hundred million dollars, more than the US Treasury then. His son William split it between eight children, and by the third generation there were over forty heirs sharing the same money. They spent lavishly on ten mansions on Fifth Avenue, The Breakers, Marble House and the two hundred and fifty room Biltmore Estate, all of which were later demolished or turned into museums. Income tax from nineteen thirteen, heavy estate taxes, expensive divorces and marriages to European aristocracy finished what was left, so by the family reunion in nineteen seventy three there were one hundred and twenty descendants and not one millionaire.
The present heirs number more than two hundred. The only branch that kept wealth is the Biltmore branch in Asheville, owned through The Biltmore Company by William A V Cecil Junior and his sister Diana Cecil Pickering, both great grandchildren of George Washington Vanderbilt the Second who built Biltmore. Other well known descendants include Anderson Cooper, son of Gloria Vanderbilt, screenwriter James Vanderbilt, and the Duke of Marlborough through Consuelo Vanderbilt.
Profession and Fortune
( The Grand Central New York was originally built by Vanderbilt family)
The Vanderbilt profession was transportation. Cornelius controlled the New York Central Railroad and major shipping lines. George Washington Vanderbilt the Second did not run the railroad day to day. He inherited around ten million dollars from his father in 1885 which is equivalent to around three hundred million dollars today and lived as a gentleman, philanthropist, patron of the arts and scientific farmer. He used his fortune to realise a vision rather than to enlarge it.
The Idea to Build
In 1888 George was twenty six. He was travelling with his mother to Asheville because mountain air was prescribed for respiratory illness. He was captivated by the climate, the beauty and the views of Pisgah Mountain.
His idea was far larger than a big house. It had three parts. First a rural retreat where he could escape New York society in the manner of the great estates of England and France. Second a showcase for architecture and conservation. Much of the land he bought was overlogged and eroded farmland and he wanted to prove that private wealth could restore it. Third a self supporting working estate.
To achieve this he employed two of the most famous men in America. Architect Richard Morris Hunt was the first American to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris and the architect of New York high society. Landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted was the designer of Central Park in New York and the father of American landscape architecture.
Hunt designed a French Renaissance chateau modelled on the Chateau de Blois in the Loire Valley. Olmsted designed not only formal gardens but the management of the forest. He created America's first scientifically managed forest. The man hired to run it Gifford Pinchot later became the first chief of the United States Forest Service.
Construction began in 1889. It took six years, a workforce of around one thousand men and a private railway spur built simply to bring materials to the site. The house was formally opened on Christmas Eve 1895 with a grand banquet in the Banquet Hall which is seventy two feet long.
Scale and Numbers
At its largest the estate was vast. Original acreage was one hundred and twenty five thousand acres or about one hundred and ninety five square miles. George bought it parcel by parcel through agents to keep prices low. Current acreage is approximately eight thousand acres which still makes it one of the largest private holdings on the East Coast. Edith Vanderbilt sold eighty seven thousand acres to the federal government after George's death and that land became Pisgah National Forest.
The house itself covers one hundred and seventy five thousand square feet or four acres of floor space. It is officially America's largest privately owned home.
It contains two hundred and fifty rooms including thirty five bedrooms for family and guests, forty three bathrooms which was an extraordinary luxury in 1895, sixty six servants bedrooms with twenty six in the main house and forty in the stable complex, sixty five fireplaces, sixteen chimneys. The Banquet Hall is forty two by seventy two feet and seventy feet high with a forty foot table that seats sixty four guests. The Tapestry Gallery is ninety feet long.
For its time it was technologically advanced. It had forced air heating, central clocks, fire alarms, a call bell system, an electric Otis lift and its own dynamo producing electricity from its opening in 1895 due to Vanderbilt's friendship with Thomas Edison. It had a refrigeration plant that could make ice.
Servants and Staff
Running Biltmore required a small village. In George and Edith's time the house had dozens of live in staff including butlers, footmen, housemaids, kitchen staff and laundry maids. The estate also employed foresters, farmers, gardeners, stablemen and dairy workers.
Today The Biltmore Company employs approximately two thousand three hundred people in Buncombe County and the surrounding counties including curators, conservators, gardeners, winemakers, hotel staff and guides. During Gilded Age dinners the ratio of staff to guests was often two to one.
Artefacts and Collections
Biltmore is a museum preserved as it was lived in. George was a serious collector.
The house holds original furnishings and antique furniture from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, a library of more than twenty two thousand books in eight languages with two secret doors hidden in bookcases, thousands of works of art including paintings by Pierre Auguste Renoir, John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler, a famous collection of Flemish tapestries in the Tapestry Gallery and Banquet Hall, Napoleon's chess set and a Louis the Fifteenth settee, a nineteen sixteen Skinner pipe organ in the Banquet Hall, an indoor swimming pool which was never properly heated and so was too cold to use, a bowling alley and an enormous basement kitchen complex, and the Halloween Room where guests on New Year's Eve 1895 were invited to paint stories on the walls.
A team of twenty highly skilled curators, conservators and collections managers preserve these treasures and often clean them with a toothbrush.
Facilities Then and Now
Originally the estate was designed to be self sufficient with a dairy farm, poultry farm, market gardens, an arboretum and a village built for workers and their families just outside the main gate. That village is now known as Biltmore Village and was designed by Richard Sharpe Smith.
Today Biltmore has grown into a major hospitality enterprise while remaining private. It now includes Antler Hill Village which features the award winning Winery which is the most visited winery in America, Antler Hill Farm, shops and restaurants. For overnight stays there is the four star Inn on Biltmore Estate and the Village Hotel and private cottages. There is an Equestrian Centre with miles of trails. The gardens cover seventy five acres of landscaped gardens including the four acre Walled Garden, Rose Garden, Italian Garden and Olmsted's three mile Approach Road. The Deer Park covers two hundred and fifty acres. The estate welcomes more than one million visitors each year.
Importantly Biltmore receives no governmental funding or grants which makes it one of the most significant National Historic Landmarks in the United States preserved solely through private funding.
Who Owns It Now
Biltmore has never been sold outside the family. After George's death Edith and Cornelia managed it. Cornelia married British aristocrat John Francis Amherst Cecil and they had two sons, Cornelius Vanderbilt Cecil and William Amherst Vanderbilt Cecil who lived from 1928 to 2017.
William Amherst Vanderbilt Cecil is credited with saving Biltmore. Edith had already opened it to the public in 1930 to generate income and create jobs during the Great Depression. William took over The Biltmore Company in 1960, added parking, restrooms and cheerful tour guides and turned it into a profitable visitor attraction. The family turned its first profit in 1969 and that profit was seventeen dollars.
Today The Biltmore Company is owned by the Cecil family and operated by his son President and Chief Executive William Amherst Vanderbilt Cecil Junior and his daughter Dini Cecil Pickering. His brother George Henry Vanderbilt Cecil formed the separate company Biltmore Farms in 1979. So it remains family owned by George Vanderbilt's grandson and great grandchildren.
Annual collection and expenses at Biltmore
The Biltmore Company is private so full accounts are not public but in 2016 the company reported about 207 million dollars revenue and recent analyst estimates place it between 200 million and 300 million dollars per year now. About 1.4 million guests visit annually. Income is almost entirely self generated. House admission provides the largest share at 70 to 90 dollars per adult with timed upgrades, rooftop and behind the scenes tours adding 35 dollars each. Hotels are the second pillar with the Inn on Biltmore Estate with 210 rooms and Village Hotel with 209 rooms running 300 to 600 dollars per night and 80 percent occupancy at peak. Then come ten restaurants, the winery which produces 150,000 cases a year, retail shops, equestrian activities, weddings and brand licensing. Expenses are huge. More than 2,400 staff, continuous preservation of the 250 room mansion built in 1895, garden upkeep, insurance, utilities and taxes. As the family motto says we do not preserve Biltmore to make a profit we make a profit to preserve Biltmore.
CNN Broadcaster Anderson Cooper
( Anderson Cooper )
Anderson Cooper is a Vanderbilt. His mother was Gloria Vanderbilt who lived from 1924 to 2019, the famous fashion designer, heiress and socialite. Gloria was the daughter of Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt. George Washington Vanderbilt the Second and Reginald were both grandsons of William Henry Vanderbilt and great grandsons of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Therefore Gloria was George's cousin.
That makes Anderson Cooper the great great great grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt and a cousin removed a few times of the current Biltmore owners. The Biltmore Estate itself has said that William Vanderbilt Cecil is a cousin removed a time or two to Anderson Cooper. Anderson Cooper does not have any ownership in or receive any special privileges at Biltmore Estate although they would love to have him visit.
Cooper is the son of Wyatt Emory Cooper and Gloria Vanderbilt and is listed as a contemporary descendant of the Vanderbilt family. He co authored the book Vanderbilt The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty.
Conclusion
It was a satisfying day for us. We left feeling that every dollar was well spent and that we had seen American history alive. The estate is valued at more than three hundred million dollars for the house and land alone and the private company value is estimated above one billion. It earns no government money. Income comes from timed house tickets at about seventy dollars per adult, plus rooftop and behind the scenes tours, two hotels the Inn on Biltmore Estate and Village Hotel charging three hundred to six hundred dollars per night, more than ten restaurants and cafes, the winery with tastings and bottle sales, the equestrian centre, weddings, conferences and licensed products. This private model pays two thousand three hundred staff and preserves the house gardens and forest for the Cecil family and for visitors.
( Avtar Mota )
